Richie Incognito, the NFL's 'dirtiest player,' to visit Dolphins

Oft-fined free agent guard could compete for a starting job

Richie Incognito, voted by his peers as the NFL's dirtiest player last season, will make a free-agent visit to the Miami Dolphins on Monday, a league source said.

The Cincinnati Bengals and Indianapolis Colts also are after the controversial offensive guard, the source said, but he will make his first visit to South Florida in hopes of signing here.

Incognito, 26, nearly joined the Dolphins in December, but they lost out on their waiver claim to the Buffalo Bills, who were lower in the standings.

Fined nearly six figures for various on-field incidents so far in his brief NFL career, Incognito is a former third-round draft pick of the St. Louis Rams. He has made 47 career NFL starts, including three to close out last season in Buffalo, but the Rams dismissed him after he had a run-in with coach Steve Spagnuolo during a Dec. 13 game against the Titans.

Incognito received a pair of personal foul penalties in that game, both for head-butting an opponent. He was fined $50,000 by the league and threatened with a possible suspension.

Incognito, who would challenge Donald Thomas and Nate Garner for the starting job at right guard, is an unrestricted free agent after the Bills opted not to tender him a 2010 contract. He earned just over $1 million last season.

A native of New Jersey who grew up in the Phoenix area, Incognito withdrew from Nebraska in 2004 after being suspended for a variety of misdeeds, including a misdemeanor assault charge. He also briefly enrolled at Oregon, where he was dismissed for failing to meet certain team conditions.

Upon his arrival in the pros, it didn't take Incognito long to earn a reputation for nastiness. Last season he was voted the NFL's dirtiest player in a Sporting News poll of 99 players; a similar poll in Sports Illustrated named him the seventh-dirtiest player in the league.

"You can call me what you want," Incognito told the Buffalo News in December. "I'm a hard-nosed football player. I bring my ‘A' game every Sunday."

Incognito is 6 feet 3 and 324 pounds. He spent the bulk of his rookie year on injured reserve after suffering a major knee injury at the NFL Scouting Combine in 2005, and he missed the final 12 games in 2007 following surgery to repair a dislocated right kneecap.

Talent isn't the issue with Incognito. The only thing holding him back, it seems, is his temper.

"There is the 90 to 95 percent of Richie that is outstanding," Rams GM Billy Devaney said last season. "It's the other 5 or 10 [percent] when the dark Richie kicks in and it becomes a problem."